Left 4 Dead 2’s Cold Stream DLC has been through more tests than a guinea pig that just survived a nuclear blast. As well as the new map, the DLC contains Blood Harvest, Crash Course, Dead Air and Death Toll from the first game, but that’s not new news. The fresh meat on this data morsel is the availability of all mutations at all times and Valve promise “other surprises and details” soon. July 24th is the release date. That’s the release date for the DLC, by the way, not the guinea pig. The guinea pig is too uncanny to release into the wild so top scientists have sealed it in a lead box which is currently being dropped into a furnace.

He’ll be fine (I’m going to say his nane is squeakers), if the nuclear blast did nothing more that lightly ruffle his hair, though he was probably wearing sunglasses as well, I’m sure squeakers can easily get out of this conundrum. He’ll be back.

When I played this as a beta about a year (or two?) ago the map was basically done. Valve Time continues to astonish. They should have hired a physicist to go with the economist. By this ecample HL3 can be expected shortly before the sun goes out.

I haven`t played this campaign since they introduced the mile-long running crescendo event. Seriously Valve, we`ve had enough of this in Dark Carnival. Please lay off the dumb mechanic, having 3 full health bots die on normal and the player limping into the safehouse on 10 hp while black and white isn`t very good.

Yeah, there was a hefty reliance on throwing massive mobs at you at the end of maps. They’re still there but the first stage is now not so bad, the second is still frustratingly awful and the final run to the end has been tweaked enough to be not so bad if you can evade or get rid of the first tank prior. They’re still not the greatest maps L4D has ever seen but at least now they’re mainly playable and a lot more interesting than they used to be.

And now cutscene free. The fuck they were thinking with that, I’ll never know.

I’m still more pissed that they wrecked Terminal in Dead Air by patching in uber mobs though. That used to be one of my favourite stages, now from the metal detectors to the safe room is just a grind.

Especially in versus it’s much more fun if team wipes are more frequent. The survivors are way overpowered most levels, so I actually like the horde crescendos in Cold Stream, Dead Air, and Death Toll.

I like medkits in versus. It might just be me as I only ever play on a team with friends over mic, but giving the survivors an ability to heal makes playing infected that much more fun. We have to co-ordinate better and execute either perfect killing moves or pace ourselves so that pressure is at a constant. No med-kit games are basically a cakewalk against anything but an equally organized team.

Lord, if we removed health kits from our games, there’d be no point playing. We’d be spending more time looking at loading screens than playing given we’ve each got near a thousand hours in playtime to our names.

It’s already pot luck as to whether anyone will make it far enough out of the safe room to make a difference *with* healthkits. That’d just be an bloodbath and I want a fight not just victory.

One thing that this game deseperately needs is Steam Workshop implimented in the game so you can download campaigns/content on the fly.

Infact i’d like a Left 4 Dead game built around that idea, similar to LittleBigPlanet where the best content will come from the community with the tools provided, My girlfriend would certainly be happy.

We do kind of already have that, courtesy of l4dmaps (I think that`s what it`s called), and valve do make map spotlights on a regular (-ish) basis.
Steam workshop would be preferable, of course. As for Left4Little Big Planet, maybe. Probably sometime `round the heat death of the universe.

“best content will come from the community”
I don’t know what LBP you have been playing, but in my experience it’s bloody impossible to find anything decent in LBP, since “sort by heart (=favorite)” and “sort by like” has been broken by achievement-hungry idiots have done this “heart4heart” and “like4like” thing.
I have yet to find a single level that is better than any of the story-maps.

THey say that steamworksop would be hard to implement for L4D, though, just because the maps tend to be huge (like 1 gig or more). Supposedly Valve is going to do it at some point, but it might just come in the form of a link to L4Dmaps.